Guide to NYC: How to Find an Apartment

Through a series of coincidences, and one tragedy, and two or maybe three half-cooked miracles, I found myself in NYC in the 90’s.

I was a writer. Or, more accurately, I was an aspiring writer. If my writerly aspirations were finally going to manifest anywhere, then NYC was the place where that would likely happen.

I had come to NYC from the north country. From Syracuse, New York, to be exact. I had been a student in the MFA program up there. Something ridiculous and vaguely tragic had occurred. Something that, in retrospect, is sad and small and pathetic. (No need to invoke the event at this juncture.) What matters is that I got through the program. Earned my degree. But I left Syracuse very much an outcast. NYC, I hoped, would be the fresh start I desperately needed.

Obviously, NYC was expensive. It was intimidating, too, with its dizzyingly complex subway maps. Worst of all, in NYC, it was impossible to find an apartment.

I spent my early days in NYC sitting in coffee shops, nursing the same cup of Sanka for hours, while I poured over the classifieds in the Village Voice with a dying ballpoint.

I looked at an apartment in the East Village on Avenue A. The bathtub was in the kitchen. This was something I had never seen before. Yet, in NYC, it is quite common for bathtubs to sit in the middle of kitchens. Also, the toilet was in a closet, openly sweating underneath a single lightbulb. Yet, most shocking of all was the fact that there was an enormous hole in the apartment wall. This hole looked as if a cartoon character had literally run straight through the wall, and left this man-shaped hole in his wake.

During the showing, I poked my head through the hole and peered at the back alley. Rain drummed on the back of my head.

Despite this apparent handicap, there were 30, maybe 40 people there to see the place. The real estate agent was handing out applications as quickly as he could. People were on their knees, on the apartment’s filthy floor, using stubby pencils to fill out their applications as quickly as they could. In NYC real estate, it is always best to be first. Always.

When the agent waved an application in my confused face, I snatched it without thought. I filled it out—also without thought—putting down my name, my address, my preferred move-in date, all that. I filled it out because that’s what everyone else was doing. I wanted the apartment (with this absurd cartoon man-hole in the wall) because everyone else wanted it. Though I knew full well that I could never actually live there.

New York warps you and shapes you, quicker than you think it will.

While I was waiting in line to hand my application back to the real estate agent, I noticed that the man standing in front of me handed in his application with a crisp $100 bill paper clipped to the page. I saw the agent wink at the man, and hear him whisper that his application would most definitely go straight to the top of the pile.

The agent took my application, saw no “bonus” attached to mine, and unconsciously buried it at the bottom of the pile, where it would again see the light of day.

I walked back to the diner where I had been drinking coffee. My stale cup of Sanka was still on the table. I must have have had a despondent look on my face because the waitress, who had been irritable with me all day, refilled my cup and assured me that things would improve. New Yorkers, I would learn, love to pity new arrivals. “New York kicks everybody in the nuts, honey,” she said. “Don’t fret. Soon enough, you’ll get used to it. Everyone does.”